Antennas can be used in conjunction with wearable devices to communicate signals wirelessly to the wearable device. Implementing antennas for small wearable devices, such as earbuds, can be challenging for a number of reasons. For example, the volume available for the antenna can be small due to a constraint of a small form factor of a device. However, performance of the antenna can be highly dependent on the size of the antenna. As another example, the space available for a ground plane for an antenna can be small. A reduction of a size of the ground plane can lead to degradation of an antenna radiation performance.
As a further example, a physical clearance between an antenna and other components, such as a touch panel, a microphone, a printed circuit board, etc., in the wearable device can be small. A small clearance can cause high radio frequency coupling between the antenna and the other components, which can lead to antenna performance degradation and large variations in a performance of the antenna due to a large tolerance of the other components in an assembly. As a further example, several body effects can degrade a performance of an antenna. The effects can include attenuation, detuning, and shadowing, due to body parts, such as skin, being a highly lossy medium with high permittivity at high frequencies.